RISC-V is a recently developed open instruction set architecture gaining a lot of attention. To achieve a lasting security on these systems and design efficient countermeasures, a better understanding of vulnerabilities to novel and potential future attacks is mandatory. This paper demonstrates that RISC-V is sensible to Jump-Oriented Programming, a class of complex code-reuse attacks. We provide an analysis of new dispatcher gadgets we discovered, and show how they can be used together in order to build a stealth attack, bypassing existing protections. A proof-of-concept attack is implemented on an embedded web server compiled for RISC-V, in which we introduced a vulnerability, allowing an attacker to remotely read an arbitrary file from the host machine.
@article{arxiv.2307.12648,
title = {Execution at RISC: Stealth JOP Attacks on RISC-V Applications},
author = {Loïc Buckwell and Olivier Gilles and Daniel Gracia Pérez and Nikolai Kosmatov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.12648},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
16 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.16212